The modern day space race is a lot different from the Soviet versus United States face off of yesteryear.

Think the space race ended in the 1960s and 1970s? Think again.

It’s been 30 years since the Space Shuttle Challenger exploded shortly after liftoff in one of the most famous tragedies in modern history, and such setbacks haven’t stopped nations from making bold steps toward the skies.

NASA, the European Space Agency, Russia, China, and others have all been in a new space race, with an unprecedented number of spacecraft visiting the moon, zooming past Pluto, landing on a comet, and circling the dwarf planet Ceres, to name just a few expeditions. NASA has its eyes set on Mars, where they hope to land a manned Mars expedition in the coming decades, and there’s been talk about bases on the moon.

And the missions are only growing in aggressiveness. In addition to a manned Mars mission and going back to the moon permanently, private companies have their eyes on mining valuable materials from asteroids.

Space exploration is becoming more and more privatized, as the technology gets cheap enough that not just gigantic governments can afford it. NASA has come to rely entirely on private companies to send payloads to the International Space Station, and the emergence of Elon Musk’s SpaceX as a major player shows how the space industry is changing.

Today, instead of a race between the United States and the Soviets in an ugly, decades long
Cold War face off, it’s an exciting time where private space companies, world governments, and commercial interests are seeing how far they can push mankind into the future.